Kids Table

 

She told me that a severed arm had been left on her porch the morning after the hurricane.

Even though it hadn’t been as bad as 2005 when the levee broke, strange things were still happening. She wasn’t the only one of her friends to find a body part lodged somewhere. She decided that it would be better to come back down to Miami and rent an apartment for a few months and party with her boyfriend.

She lightly touched her boyfriend’s thigh. He took a bite of his bagel. The edge of a piece of smoked salmon hung out his mouth.

The boyfriend asked me where I went to school. I told him that I just graduated from Central Florida University. He said that he had friends who went there. Friends that were involved with Pre-Law, or it might have been Pre-Med, or maybe graphic design.

Someone put their hands on my shoulders. They asked me if I went to synagogue today. I said yes. They said I must be a good Jew. I said I was okay. They asked me what I needed to repent for. I said that it didn’t matter now. They said that they had spent the whole year inside and they didn’t need to confess to anything because nothing happened.

She kept on describing everything that happened after the hurricane and everything that was still happening in Miami. Tulane postponed the semester. Someone had tried to give her dirty coke at a nightclub called Space. Her roommate kept on finding toes floating in her toilet. The roommate had seven now, all with the same nail polish. A Hassidic man yelled at her for walking around Surfside in a crop top. Her roommate’s texts got increasingly frantic. The roommate thought that the body parts were being deliberately placed for some reason. She didn’t go to services or fast today because she was busy writing blog posts for a website called debtconsolidation.com.

From across the room, a person moaned and said that it felt so good to finally eat again.

Someone at the table told me I didn’t want to go to Vietnam because Vietnam was a good place to become an alcoholic. He said used to own a factory in Dong Nai but closed it down and moved it to China when he realized how much the Vietnamese were overcharging him. He said that he couldn’t blame them. That we had killed so much of them over there that it wasn’t exactly fair but it wasn’t not right either. He told me that he made a point of overcharging Polish people for his services.

The boyfriend asked me how I was planning to make money. I said that I would figure it out. He said that I should turn some clips I had made into an NFT. I said that I don’t think that that would work out so well. He said sure it would and walked me through every single step of making an NFT and putting it on the market. I said that I had to go fix myself another glass of wine, but I would be back.

I poured white wine into a clear plastic cup. At the table, she announced her friend had found an eight toe, but now this time it was on the toilet seat, not floating around in the bowl. Now this time her roommate sent a photo of the toe. She passed the phone around. People gasped and muttered and asked her if her roommate was in counseling.

When I came back the boyfriend said that he had just made an account for me on opensea.io. He said that all I had to do was ask and lend him some money for Ethereum and he could turn whatever file I sent him into a non-fungible token. I asked the boyfriend what he liked most about living in Miami. He said the vibes were right and that sometimes early in the mooring if he was on a quiet part of the beach, he felt like he could hear the voice of God. I asked him what God had told him and he said that God said that everything was going to be alright. He took another bite of his bagel.

She told me that she was going back to school soon and she could put in a good word for me at debtconsolidation.com and that all I had to do was write copy. I said that I was okay and that I had a job. She asked me what I did and I said that I patched small holes in walls at the secondary campus of a synagogue and that if the hole was too big I had to call someone else instead of trying to patch it myself. She said that that sounded very interesting. I asked her if she was hungry. She said that she had big lunch. She asked me if I wanted to see a picture of the toe. I said yes. It was a picture of a severed toe sitting on the toilet bowl. The nail was painted gold. It looked like a nice bathroom.